As everyone in the world doesn't speak in the same language,
we have unofficially set an international language, the language which we can
use it to communicate with the rest of the world, the English. But the
obstacle in communicating doesn't all gone because for some non-native
speakers, they can’t speak accurately or being very fluent in this second
language.
According to ”A Chinese businessman's awkward English”(2015), published by BBC News, Lei Jun, the founder and CEO of Xiaomi, was
criticized widely in Chinese social media about his English skill which he
shortly show in a launch event in India last week. The video of Lei has been
post in Youku and got a lot of blaming comments, but some gave him encouraging
comments since he is not a native speaker.
After reading the article, I was quickly search for the clip.
Well, his accent is typically like other Chinese people. I can’t explain it in
words. Here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKT-169biQw.
You’d better watch it yourself.
I’m not sure that the social media censured Lei because of
his accent or his fluency. But I will talk about the accent first. For me as
the non-native speaker in English, I think it is very normal that we can’t get
a beautiful accent like a native speaker because our parents are not American
or British. And even in America, there are a lot of different accents. Therefore,
accent is not the tissue for me. If you can’t get the right one, it would be
fine, but if you can, it would be better. Because the main point of learning
language is not to get the right accent but to communicate with people.
For the fluency, to get it, you need to practice and use
English more often. Perhaps Lei usually works in China so he doesn’t have to use
English in communicating, or his English skill is just really poor. There are
two assumptions in my head but honestly I am pretty inclined to the second one.
Similarly to Thai students, though the ministry of education
put English as a required subject in the curriculum, many students still speaks
in poor English or can’t speak it at all. This case maybe also happen in China since
it has a broad territory and the government is unable to administrate all the teaching
quality. And Lei’s English is just a result of the defective education system.
Lastly, I wish next time Lei will show us his new impressive
English skill and prove himself to those disdainful comments.
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Reference
I think the reason why many students who still can't speak English really well is because they're too lazy to study, actually not just only English but also Math and Science as well.
ReplyDeleteI can't agree with Pomm. I think that Thai students often work very hard: they have long hours and long terms, more than students in Australia, for example, and a lot more than students in countries such as Finland, which have excellent educational outcomes ("Hours of instruction for pupils aged 12", 2012. And my experience, which is admittedly limited, is that Thai students do plenty of homework and attend plenty of extra classes outside of school.
DeleteBut if laziness is not the problem, at least not in many cases, what is?
My guess is that its poor teaching. English classes often don't teach English, they teach English grammar, and these are very different things. Learning a lot of English grammar is not learning English.
Except for me, I'm sure that everyone in our class can speak Thai very well. And I'm pretty sure that you all learnt to speak Thai before you ever set foot in a Thai school or ever had a Thai lesson.
And I spoke English pretty well before I ever heard of things like nouns, verbs, subjects, independent clauses, restrictive relative clauses, and the like. Grammar is useful, especially for a mastery of academic versions of English or any other language, but I don't think that teaching grammar is the same as teaching English or any other language.
That said, we are going to do some intensive grammar next week.
It might be curriculum too. I'm not sure how the current one in Thai's compulsory education is, but, for me, I studied English grammar 3 times (during primary school, secondary school, and university) and they were all the same. If I haven't challenged myself to read Harry Potter and other undergrad's textbooks in English, I'd still be in lower general class by now.
DeleteBy the way, there might still be grammatical error in my response here, so please do not discredit me harshly.
Reading novels is a great way to improve your writing and general command of a language. I enjoyed Harry Potter, and Rowling writes solid English.
DeleteAnd now that you've mentioned them, perhaps we should read a short novel this term ...
I agree with you that we use language to communicate. So, we should focus on what speaker trying to say, rather than an accent. Unfortunately, there still a big proportion of people who care about accent. It is obvious that good accent is better than poor accent. Specifically, in this news, if CEO ,who is in the highest position in company, could speak English clearer, though not as good as native speaker, it would be more benefit to him and his company. At least, people can understand everything he's trying to say.
ReplyDeleteMost people want to speak English fluency, but not all of them can do it. I think if you use it as much as you can, you will have a lot of experiences and it will make your English better.
ReplyDeleteIn the section of Thai students, I think in Thailand we don't have many situations to use English, but if you want to be better in English, you can make your own situation to use it. For example, go to camp that use English as a main language.
Every one want to expert in English ,I think they try very hard to reach the goal so we should to expect their attempt.
ReplyDeleteI follow your link both BBC and Youtube ,and I found that it has some people look down him. I think it's quite rude to do that :(
I agree with you that most people couldn't use Engllish well because they are not familiar with the language such as in daily life; moreover, they hardly use the language to communicate in usual situation like our country, Thailand. Almost all Thai students have learned English for a long time and works very hard in English but the problem is Thai people can't communicate in English well. One of the causes is the lacking of practicing and using every day like the chinese in this article.
ReplyDeleteThe more you practice in English, the more you expert.
Speaking an impressive English is very crucial for person who is a CEO of big company and also wants to expand his market to another country, whether they speak English or not. If you can speak English, you could communicate with many many people and as the globalization nowadays, you couldn't avoid this.
ReplyDelete